White is a good, basic background color for any web page. After all, most printed pages use black text on white paper. However, you don't have to use a white background if you don't want to. This page, for example, uses a light pink. Try selecting colors from the list box below and see how this page looks with different background colors.

   It is easy to change the background color of your web page, but don't get carried away. Just because you can use bright colorful backgrounds, that doesn't mean you should. If you just used the color selector above, you probably noticed that this page does not look good with many of the colors. The background color should match the other elements on your page. Readability is another important consideration. Text becomes difficult to read if you use a dark background. If there is a lot of text on your pages, you will probably want to use a light background color.

   Background color is applied to the whole body of the page, not just a part of it. Therefore, background color is set as an attribute of the body tag, with the value being the color code. The background color attribute bgcolor is put inside the opening body tag.
It looks like this:

body bgcolor="#nnnnnn"

Since you are a beginner at web page building, we won't go into all the details of how to calculate hexadecimal color codes. Let's do it the easy way. Take a look at this Color Code Chart. When looking at the color chart, choose a few colors you would like to test on your own page, then write down the hex codes for those colors.

ps. There is also a link to this chart in the Resources section, so you can refer to it at any time.

body bgcolor="#nnnnnn"

• The bgcolor attribute is used to designate a background color for a page, and it is placed inside the opening body tag.
• Colors are designated with hexadecimal color codes.
• Choose a color that matches the other elements on your page.